I recently posted about life not being complicated (Life’s Complicated?) which attempted to answer the question: With all of the verses, commandments and instructions in the Bible how do we know what to do?

Jesus answered this in Matthew 22:36-40: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

These verses can be summarized by: love God; love people. So how do we do that? Specifically, how do we love God?

Andy Stanley recently made a great point about marriages. Paraphrasing, he stated that if both you and your spouse were to follow every possible marriage rule you probably wouldn’t have a great marriage. Why? Because a marriage is not about following rules; it’s about a relationship. We do follow the marriage rules but because of the relationship and ultimately because we love our spouse.

What do you do when you love someone? You spend time with them. If we love God we spend time with Him. Because we spend time with Him and because we are in love we will want to follow the rules. In addition, we will want to love people, we will start doing things, we will stop doing things, we will start to think in a different way – we will change.

We will change but not because we get up in the morning and think good Christians do this and don’t do this. It’s because we love Him that we follow the rules and love people. Following marriage rules doesn’t make a marriage. Following God’s rules doesn’t make a disciple. It’s all about the relationship. It’s all about love and love equals time.

How are you doing with spending time with the One who created you; the One who loves you more than you can fathom? If you are doing a great job following the rules but a lousy job with the time my guess is you are frustrated trying to follow the rules and trying to love people.

In order to have an intimate relationship with God so we can love people we must spend time with Him.  How do we spend time with God?  I recently posted about this in Change of Heart?

What else? How else do we love God? Stay tuned…

In His Service,

Ed